FROM January 2018 ships calling at European ports need to have a plan for, and start monitoring CO2 emissions.These plans, voyage reports and annual submissions need to be verified by a third party body. Shipowners, or those responsible for vessel compliance with the European rules, need to have a verified monitoring plan by August 2017.
This is why various class societies and other verification bodies are rushing to become accredited for this job and a number of announcements have been made recently.
Accreditation
There is a list of 17 national accreditation bodies in Europe (They get called Nabs). These are national entities that will be giving the class societies, and other verification companies, the ticket to verify the monitoring plans and emission reports for shipowners’ vessels.
To quote European Accreditation, a service co-ordinating European Nabs: “Accreditation is a third-party evaluation and demonstration of competence. Accreditation is a public authority activity. It is the last level of public authority control. The purpose of accreditation is to provide an authoritative statement of the competence of a body to perform conformity assessment activities.”
Once a class society or other company has got a certificate from one accreditation body, it can work on any vessel under the EU rules. The EU did not only make rules for the shipowners for monitoring reporting CO2 emissions annually, but also rules for the organisations that will perform these specific ship emission verification activities.
Organisations accredited to verify a shipowners EU MRV plans (As of 2/3/2017)
| Body accredited for verification of vessel monitoring plans, voyage reports or annual reports | NAB issuing accreditation | |
| ABS | ESYD | |
| Bureau Veritas | UKAS | |
| CTI (Shenzhen) Corporation | UKAS | |
| Class NK | UKAS | |
| Dromon Bureau of Shipping | UKAS | |
| Emicert | ESYD | |
| Lloyd’s Register | UKAS | |
| Verifavia | UKAS |
Hellenic Accreditation System (ESYD) accreditations can be found here
UK Accreditation Service (UKAS) accreditations can be found here
Monitoring plans
Under the rules, owners need to pay the verification bodies to have each monitoring plan verified as meeting the EU rules; but it remains unclear how this verification should be used. As monitoring and recording of emissions on a voyage by voyage basis will start in January 2018, the safe assumption is that European port state inspectors may look to come on board vessels to check that there is a verified plan, and CO2 emissions and cargo work done is being monitored and recorded. The EU regulation requires the annual emissions for 2018 to be accredited and submitted by early 2019.
The data collected by the EU from the MRV system could be used to determine the controbution that owners may have to contribute to a market based measure in the near future. The European Parliament has suggested that shiping should be included into the revampled regional european emission trading scheme. The proposal is seen as deliberate pressure for the IMO to push forward international MBM plans.
